The Big Question: What policies would make a third party viable?

Rob Richie, Executive Director of FairVote, said:

With a steady number of Americans registering to vote as independents and minor party members, we should adopt majority voting rules to avoid vote-splitting — this fall, as many as a dozen races for governor and U.S. Senate might be “won” by candidates who a majority of voters voted against. The most efficient means to uphold majority rule in one trip to the polls is alternative voting (also called ranked choice voting and instant runoff voting — see instantrunoff.com). Alternative voting is used in a growing number of American cities, is expected to be the subject of a national referendum in the United Kingdom next year and has been backed by the likes of Tom Friedman, Hendrik Hertzberg, John McCain, Howard Dean and Barack Obama. More fundamentally, we need to look at providing fair representation through candidate-based systems of proportional voting like those used in Peoria, Ill., Amarillo, Texas, Hartford, Conn., and Cambridge, Mass.

Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com, said:

Third parties are basically illegal in America: Restrictive ballot access laws — written and passed by legislators from the two “major” parties — make it almost impossible for third parties to exist. In Georgia, for example, a third political party must receive 20 percent of the vote in a statewide race in a previous election to be placed on the ballot, and in order to get on the ballot in the first place,  you need many thousands of signatures on a petition.

In North Carolina, according to Wikipedia, “third parties must obtain signatures on a petition equal to at least 2 percent of the total number of votes cast for Governor in the most recent election by no later than 12:00 noon on the first day of June before the election in which the Party wishes to participate. In addition, at least 200 signatures must come from at least four separate US Congressional Districts each within the state. To qualify for the 2010 or 2012 election ballot a new political party must gather at least 85,379 signatures within approximately a 3.5 year time span, averaging at least 67 signatures every day for three and half years straight counting weekdays and holidays.”

I won’t bore my readers with more details. Suffice to say that each and every state has their own, often byzantine rules and regulations, all of which are devised by the “major” parties to keep the competition — other parties — off the ballot.

Yes, America is going around the world trying to spread “democracy” — when we don’t even have a real democracy right here at home, where the game is rigged. Shocking, isn’t it?

Michelle D. Bernard, president and CEO of the Independent Women’s Forum, said:

The Two Dominant Parties Will Co-opt Issues that Could Drive the Creation of Third Party

There isn’t any issue, or set of issues, that would be able to drive the creation and sustain the existence of a third party. Any time an issue rises to the level of driving the consideration of a third party, one of the two major parties moves to co-opt the momentum and drive many supporters to realign with that party.

You can see this dynamic with the Tea Party. This spontaneous grassroots movement, which says it’s focused on cutting government spending and reducing the size of government, would appear to be a natural potential for a third party. Instead, its members have increasingly moved to work within the Republican Party, which has a more natural affinity for its primary cause of limited government than does the Democrat party. Rather than a third party, you have a changed, renewed Republican party.

Americans frustrated with the two-party system might be disappointed, but the reality is that the dynamic in our political system makes the creation of a third party extremely unlikely. Their focuses, or even names, could ultimately change (as they have throughout our American history) but we are likely to be stuck with the Republicans and the Democrats, for better or worse.